Published in the Greenville Journal

I’ve always wanted to take South Carolina’s high school exit exam, to see if I could get out of high school, without ever attending it here. 

I can’t (take it).

It doesn’t matter if you reach senior year with all the required credits and a deposit on your cap and gown.  If you don’t pass that test, you don’t graduate, period.

The test is administered in the 10th grade.  My best guess is that gives you more chances to make the grade.  But if you pass on your first try, junior and senior year are kind of begging the question, aren’t they? 

No one knows what’s on the test. It’s literally top secret. 

The tests, before and after they are administered, are under lock and key, and any teacher or administrator who peeks could lose their job. It’s that serious.

Because 10th graders take the test, the secret of its contents remains completely safe.  The only thing recently tested 10th graders will confirm for an inquisitive volunteer monitor is that the questions are boring, lame, or “cinchy.”

Based on glimpses of ancient tests printed on vellum, a friendly administrator confirmed to me what’s not on the test.  None of the questions test the students on skills or knowledge necessary for navigating the real world.

The state’s Department of Education composes the exit exam, and DOE is evidently not concerned whether high school graduates are equipped to manage themselves, or money, once they’re set free.

So I have a few suggested questions to include in future tests:

What is a budget, and how do you plan one?

What percent of your monthly income should you apply toward rent?

When walking toward someone on a sidewalk or down a hallway, which side should you walk on?

What is a mortgage? 

What is a credit score?  Name three ways to ruin it.

What is the best time to show up for a job interview?  For work?

Name the three most effective methods of preventing pregnancy.

On average, what does it cost to raise a child to the age of 18?

What is the food pyramid, and which food group enjoys its own “all you can eat” category?

Using the sample check register, checking statement, and cancelled checks provided, balance this checkbook.

What does BMI stand for, and how is it calculated? 

Define insurance.

Define interest on a loan. 

What makes junk food junky?

What does “each sold separately” mean?

What does “NO” mean?

Why don’t you know most of this stuff?

There are courses that teach high school students these things, and more.  Unfortunately, they are not required courses. They have to take keyboarding, but they don’t need to know how to balance a checkbook.

I don’t care where your child is in school, everyone should be required to take Mr. Bouton’s Economics class at Greenville High. I wish all my kids had taken it.

It’s not “guns and butter,” but real world budget planning. The budget includes rent, buying a car, car insurance, clothing, furniture, and food (which includes a monthly food menu). They learn the basics of investing, using funny money, in the real stock market. 

Even if they “already have” clothing, food, and cars, students have to yank the silver spoons out of their mouths and learn the mechanics of living a real life anyway.

It’s not the school’s job to raise my children.  But too often, fussing at (some of) my offspring about managing money wisely is like yelling at a cat.  But grading them on the task is a game-changer, and with this course work, truly life changing.

It’s important stuff they should all know.

The courses are available, and the teachers are ready to teach the children well, so why doesn’t the Department of Education make real life know-how at least as mandatory as keyboarding?

The question tests the limits of logic, but that’s not a required course either.

 

Published in the Greenville Journal

We’ve parked the computer that our children still don’t realize they are lucky enough to share, let alone have, in the kitchen area so that we can be aware of when they’re on it, and for how long.

We don’t have too much worry about where they are when on it, because we’ve lectured and sermonized about “stranger danger” on the Internet. For the inevitable event that they decide to ignore our stirring sermons, we’ve also installed a “Safe Eyes” program that is so puritanical in its strictures against inappropriate sites or topics that they’ve had to give up IM’ng their friend Fanny.

If you don’t know what IM’ng is, you are way behind on your hip acronyms. They’re de rigueur if you want to maintain your delusion of open communication with your kids. I think it stands for “Instant Messaging,” sort of an electronic version of the old party line, where news of break-ups, new romances, ugly rumors, uglier truths, and even occasionally useful news about pop quizzes travels at exponential rates within the dependent set.

The other day I walked into the room while my youngest was tearing back and forth across the keyboard, dishing about sonnets and quatrains, no doubt. I’m sure it was academic in nature because she pushed a button and the screen went blank the moment I asked, “What’s new?”

“Nothing.”

“Oh… I get it,” I winked. “PIR so TTFN.”

“What?”

I like to remind my kids from time to time that I know a few things about a few things within their set. They always look a little nauseous during these tete á tetes, but it reminds them that I’m a lot cooler than they’d like to think.

“I get it – Parents In Room, so Ta Ta For Now.”

She cut me a look that should take years off my life, and intoned, “OMG… you are so L-A-M-E!”

OK, I did get that. LAME is not an acronym so much as an anthem. It actually stands for “lame” as in hopelessly queer, gross, ignorant, unfashionable, or some other chronic and embarrassing failure.

OMG is an acronym for “OH… MAH…GAH.” It morphed from earlier, pre-teen days when all news, good or bad, was greeted among their set by repeating this mantra while frantically jumping and clutching one another’s arms.

Now that they are 14 and so over that middle school brand hysteria, it has shortened to merely “OMG,” and always delivered with deadpan sarcasm.

I get OMG a lot. Almost as often as TMI.

TMI is not exclusive to teens, but almost. If you’re lucky enough to live with people who do not editorialize about every blessed thing you say, then perhaps you’re not hip to this acronym for “Too Much Information.”

I hear TMI from them every time I mention anything having to do with my pre-married or pre-mom years when their dad was just someone I stalked, or anything having to do with their parents and even partial nudity.

TMI is actually a very handy conversational rudder. My girls tell me it really tamps down unwanted info about friends’ lunar cycles, Sisyphean boyfriend dramas, and visits to the dermatologist.

 When my mother recently complained that she knew far more than she cared to know about her friends’ various procedures or the vagaries of peristalsis, I suggested she try smiling and saying “TMI.”

Problem is, accurate hearing is so spotty within her set that TMI is too often mistaken for “Oh my!” which is, ironically enough, a rhetorical invitation to elaborate.

We have a few acronyms developed within the bosom (TMI) of our own family that enhances economy of expression around here.

DQ is for Drama Queen. It’s uttered, usually under one’s breath, when someone is perhaps exaggerating the impact of a recent event on the speaker’s emotional, financial, social and/or academic stability.

Q is for Queen, as in Queen of Bathroom Talk. It’s been a long time since we’ve had to bark this acronym in the wake of giggling about any topic that is best confined to the bathroom. Luckily, this alimentary source of humor seems to ebb in kids about the same time that OH MAH GAH settles down to OMG.

MFM means “More For Me.” This is rarely uttered when I’ve prepared some delicious dessert that one of the kids somehow doesn’t like (because I never make dessert). It usually means something like “more brussel sprouts for me,” something healthy that the kids have not tuned into yet, so the servings for brussel sprout aficionados are happily larger.

LTAM has more mileage on it than any other. It stands for “Let’s Talk About Me.” I know a lot of you are thinking, “What’s wrong with that?” And you’re absolutely right, which is why I hear it more often that I’d like.

This acronym was first served up at our dinner table, when conversation, if you could call it that, was full of non-sequitors focusing on the self.

One memorable example is when one child’s response to a long tale of woe just shared by a sibling was, “Hey, that reminds me of something: me!” And then she proceeded to chatter on about something that interested her, usually herself, leaving the sibling’s tale of woe in the conversational ash heap. It was the most blatant example of Let’s Talk About Me that it was instantly shorthanded to LTAM.

Unfortunately, LTAM became our kids’ rejoinder to almost all conversational detours at the dinner table that we’ve tried to steer away from it by discussing world events, the local economy, or academics. But those topics have a hard time competing with “me” for most people.

I could go on and elaborate on other family acronyms, but my children insist that they would all fall too squarely, too embarassingly under TMI and/or LTAM, so TTFN.

 

Published in the Greenville Journal

What’s the worst thing your child could ever do?

The answer varies according to age, but we start out answering it in
terms of the worst things we’ve already seen. When it comes to
toddlers, parents often answer with tales of public tantrums, temporary
disappearances, and Pollock-quality artwork using indelible markers.

It’s when kids get older, and the consequences of “the worst” can be
life-altering, or even life-threatening, that the answers become mostly
hypothetical. But sometimes, a parent’s answer to the question “the
worst” can be loaded with unintended meaning.

When I was in college attending a family reunion, this topic somehow
came up. A goofy bachelor uncle deigned to ask the question and then
answer it, using me as a handy “Exhibit A.”

In his opinion, “the worst thing” a “grown child” like me, a college
co-ed, could ever do would be to get knocked up. This was hastily
followed by rounds of “God forbid” murmured among the assembled
relatives.

Then my sainted mother pronounced that, “Of course this would never
happen.” None of this surprised me a bit, including the fact that the
entire discussion took place as if Exhibit A were not sitting right
there.

What did surprise me was her follow-up to “That would never happen.”
They would ship me off to the boonies. Idaho, to be exact. I would live
with her sister who married a doctor. There I would gestate, away from
the public eye, while we (as in “they”) planned out my future.

She had apparently been hoping for the best, while planning against “the worst.”

I know she meant well, but all that my 20-year-old ears could
interpret was that if I ever found myself in any “worst” or similarly
unthinkable situation, I was pretty much on my own. Telling my parents
would be admitting that my decision-making ability up to that point was
so patently flawed that I should forfeit any future decision-making
capability and rot in Idaho.

Without meaning to say so, she was basically telling me, “I don’t
want to know” if, God forbid, I ever made any bad or sad mistakes.

Luckily, I never had to test my interpretation. I’ve never been to Idaho, and I hope to have that noted in my epitaph.

But it stuck with me, and so I’ve made a point, at different points
in their lives, of asking each of my children, at different times,
ages, and stages, over the years, “What is the worst thing you could
ever do?”

Sometimes they’ve reacted as if it were a trick question, or with great suspicion.

“What do you mean ‘the worst thing,’ Mom? I haven’t done anything wrong… lately.”

But I press on, reassuring that there’s no wrong answer, and I’m not
on an entrapment expedition. I just want to know what they think would
be the worst thing they could ever do, and more particularly, how do
they think their dad and I would answer the question.

Murder is a popular answer.

“Killing someone, and not caring that I did it.”

Good answer. First degree murder devoid of remorse is hard to beat on “the worst” list.

At this point, the conversation I’m attempting to have often detours
into eye rolling, heavy sighs, cuticle chewing, or frantic pantomimes
to get the dogs to rescue them from my orbit.

But I patiently wait for serious answers.

“I dunno… crashing the car?”

No, that’s not even a runner-up.

At this point, the bizarre nature of the topic gets the best of them, so I have to answer a question in turn.

“I don’t know, Mom! Why do we have to talk about this in the first place? Be NORMAL.”

Which gives me a new tack to pursue.

Can they imagine any topic that I’m unwilling to talk about? Good, bad, gross, contagious or unthinkable?

No, in fact, they often wish there were.

And so, before I let them wriggle away, I give them my crib notes to the test, just in case they can’t read between the lines.

For us, the worst thing they could ever do is not trust me or their
dad enough to tell us when they’re in trouble, or if they’ve made a bad
or sad mistake. We won’t tell them what to do, and there are lots of
things we can’t or won’t “fix” for them, but we’ll always do our best
to help them figure things out.

There are too many kids, teens and young adults who “would rather
die” than tell their parents something they’re convinced their parents
don’t want to hear, or deal with. Then they compound the problem by
trying to solve it, or ignore it, without help when they most need it.

You may have a different “worst case scenario” in mind, but there
are worse things than posing probing questions your kids don’t want to
answer. Even if your kids are like mine who really prefer not to talk
about it now, they’ll be more likely to trust you down the road, if
worse comes to worst.

Published in the Greenville Journal

Ever since my first shift at my teens’ high school “school
store” nine years ago, I’ve had a hard time with selling.

I don’t have a problem with sales, per se, but I can’t “sell
ice cubes to Eskimos.” Eskimos don’t need ice cubes. It would be a crime to
convince Eskimos that they need any frozen confections.

Question: What if someone convinced Eskimos, a long, long
time ago, that they wouldn’t be happy unless they buy ice cubes? Lots of them.

Would it be OK then to sell ice cubes to Eskimos?

What if selling marked-up ice cubes to Eskimos was part of a fund-raiser to improve Eskimo schools? Would it be OK then?

The conventional wisdom says yeah, if the ice cubes fund a cool cause.

I’m still not sold.          

The Eskimos are my kids and their fellow high school students. The ice cubes are myriad – more names, shapes and flavors of nasty candy and junk food than I can keep up with. There’s a new brand every time I clock in at the school store.

I work the breakfast shift once a month, mostly because I get to catch up on chat with my friend Donna.

You would not believe the drek kids buy for, or in lieu of, breakfast.

I remind kids wearing braces that they should not be eating Gummy Bears. They buy ’em anyway.

I suggest bottled water as a healthy breakfast alternative to Starbursts or Rice Krispie Treats. The kids glance at me for a second, and then order a bag of chips as a chaser.

The only items that come close to being “breakfast food” are Pop Tarts and muffins. Pop Tarts are flat, frosted junk food. The muffins are not whole grain, but processed, loaded with fat and sugar.

I worry that because kids are buying this junk from someone’s mother, the sale is stamped with an implicit seal of mother approval.

I have been reminded, politely, that I’m a volunteer, not a nutritionist. I have also been reminded that the store is a fund-raiser, and the “kids are going to buy it anyway, so it might as well be for a good cause.”

I don’t buy that.

Where, exactly, are students going to buy junk food at school unless the adults who run the place provide them with opportunities to buy it?

Instead, we should take the opportunity to serve the best interests of our captive student audience by serving them an entirely new alternative: fresh, healthy food.

 Based on empirical evidence from my own kitchen, if you provide fresh fruits, cheese, yogurt, milk and 100 percent fruit juices for snacking (and nothing else) kids will actually consume it.

We’re dealing with an obesity epidemic, and yet we’re selling fat and sugar to mostly overweight kids. There is something truly fatheaded about this picture.

You know that funny TV ad where a guy orders a double chin, some love handles and a side of blubber at a fast food restaurant? How is school store junk food any different or better?

We’re selling low self-esteem on a stick, pastel-colored premature puberty, heart-shaped early heart disease, sprinkled cellulite, frosted future eating disorders, and marshmallow-flavored man boobs. When we’re talking about our kids, and today we’re talking about so many overweight kids that it’s not even funny.

My own kids are skinny, but they won’t be thin forever if I don’t teach them proper eating habits now. And skinny is not an antidote to high cholesterol.

Skinny allowed me to think I didn’t need to pay attention. When I quizzed my ninth-grader about what she bought for lunch every day, she insisted it was “something healthy” from the school store. “Healthy” was a PB & J, a bottle of Gatorade and a bag of candy.

GROSS.

The bread resembles real whole grain bread in color only. The sandwich is really a smear of fat, sugar and salt between two squares of fat, sugar and starch.

 Gatorade is not “good for you” unless you’ve just run five miles and your electrolytes need recharging. It’s loaded with sugar and salt. The bag of candy was the only item on her menu not masquerading as something healthy.

I broke with my longstanding tradition and MADE LUNCH FOR HER. (I wish John Wooden wrote parenting books – “The worst thing you can do to someone is to do something for them that they can do for themselves.” But I made lunch anyway.)

Her cronies were stunned when she brought a bagged lunch. It was healthy: two hard-boiled eggs, a real bagel, a clementine, and 100 percent apple juice to drink. They were aghast when she said her MOM made it.

Worried, Mary Pat asked, “Is your mother… ill?”

I’m perfectly healthy, thank you, but what my kids have been eating is anything but. Whether our own kids are skinny, fat, or something in between, it’s time for us all to wake up, smell the toffee and throw it out.

Giving junk food to our kids is bad parenting. Selling it to kids, even as a fund-raiser, is bad policy. If you can raise a lot of money to support any school, I say good for you. But it’s high time we devise a fund-raiser that’s good for school and good for you, too.